Tagged Questions

GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project. The founding goal of the project was, in the words of its initial announcement, to develop "a sufficient body of free software [...] to get along without any software that is not free.

(Note: Both of these examples may require GNU or BSD find and may not work as-is with the POSIX "edition" of find).
Both of the scriptlets below must be understood as excerpts from way more complex ...

I've wrote me a little script to test (or extract) a very big multi-volume tar archive (note: created with GNU tar), each of which 00x.tar chunk will fit onto a standard DVD:
#!/bin/bash
d=$(dirname ...

In the GNU OS a process can only write data to a pipe if another process reads the same data (from the same pipe) at the same time.
Is there something like a pipe which lets the 1st process write and ...

I will have to repair a computer, which will be used by kids (9-12 years).
This computer had Vista, but I will install a Gnu/Linux distro, for security/pedagogic reasons.
I just come here to ask if ...

As per my knowledge/understanding both help and man came at the same time or have very little time difference between them. Then GNU Info came in and from what I have seen is much more verbose, much ...

I wanted to try out the GNU usb install that was released with Guix 0.7. The problem is that when I try to boot from the USB, it freezes, with the word GRUB and a flashing type line. I followed the ...

I don't think the shell/utilities in historical Unix nor in something as "recent" as 4.4BSD supported using a double-dash(or two consecutive hyphens) as an end of options delimiter. With FreeBSD, you ...

Is there a way to tell ping to show its usual termination statistics without stopping the execution?
For instance, I'd like to quickly view:
--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
2410 packets transmitted, ...

When searching for string (no regex etc.) in large file less filename and less -b 1 filename quits or prints it cannot allocate memory. top shows less using roughly about 5% of memory before it dies ...

I am maintaining a legacy cygwin (with GNU tar v1.21) system and a legacy Solaris 9 system. The configuration of the Solaris 9 system is fixed and cannot be upgraded (i.e. I can't install gnu tar for ...

I have been adjusting to using GETOPT and GETOPTS in my shell scripts and custom functions to enable me to use the functions that I create more flexibly. After using a number of UNIX functions I have ...

I'm using oh-my-zsh and its ssh-agent plugin on OSX, but lately somebody upstream decided to use ps x. I'm not entirely sure what that even does, since I haven't used a GNU userland in something close ...

What is the very fundamental difference between Unix, Linux, BSD and GNU?
Unix was the earliest OS, so the term 'Unix like' is understandable, since they have kernel, file system structure, most of ...

Up until this month, my shell configs have been pretty simple (just a .bashrc or .bash_profile with some aliases mainly), but I have been refactoring it so I can get different behavior depending on ...

I have been trying to parallelize the following script, specifically each of the three FOR loop instances, using GNU Parallel but haven't been able to. The 4 commands contained within the FOR loop run ...

So GNU/Linux is an operation system, consisting of several programs at a minimum: Linux kenel, gcc, gnu-binutils, Gnome desktop, etc.
What makes a Linux distribution GNU? Is it the tools, with which ...

I see numbers in parentheses after program names and it confuses me. For example, perldoc mentions that perl grep is "similar in spirit to, but not the same as, grep(1) and its relatives."
What does ...

On the GNU Project webpage, there's a subsection called "All GNU packages" which lists the various software in the GNU project.
Are there any GNU distributions which use only these packages -- i.e. a ...

As I understand it many Mac OS X command-line tools (like ls, cp, chmod, chown etc.) are imported from FreeBSD.
Which version of FreeBSD contains the command-line tools most compatible with the OS X ...

Linux itself is not a copy of Unix because one can argue it simply conforms to the POSIX standard. However, how about the GNU Coreutils which contains utilities like ls, cd and rm, etc...? Is there ...